Apple is one of the most popular brands in computers inside the U.S. and has been using NVIDIA GPUs in many of its products like its line of MacBooks for a while. The NVIDIA 9400 series GPUs that Apple was using were subject to significantly higher than normal failure rates leading to many notebooks failing or having issues with graphics. After such failures, many wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is seeking a new GPU supplier for its computers.
Any PC gamer will tell you that the better your video card is the better graphics you get when you play PC games. We see lots of customized NVIDIA video cards with new cooling solutions and other features come across the market, but custom ATI video cards are less common.
AMD made a big song and dance of their new ATI DirectX 11 video card last week, showing it off for the first time at QuakeCon and putting on some heady demonstrations of its indecently high performance. Well, we say “showing it off”, but actually AMD kept a tight lid on the physical design of the new card; unfortunately not tight enough to avoid Chiphell getting their hands on some leaked images.
MSI have announced five new notebooks in its C-Series, the 16-inch WXGA CX600, CR600-013 and CR600-017, and the 17.3-inch WXGA++ CX700 and CR700. Each packs a Pentium Dual Core processor – the T4200 2.0GHz, aside from the CR600-017 which gets the slightly faster T4300 2.1GHz – together with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard-drive.
Dell have announced a new series of 14.1- and 15.6-inch Vostro business notebooks, the 1014, 1015 and 1088. Intended as entry-level machines, they include integrated optical drives, Intel Core 2 Duo processors and EnergyStar 5.0 certification, together with four USB ports, gigabit ethernet and Bluetooth.
With official photos, full specifications, an unboxing and demo video behind us, all that’s left for MSI’s X-Slim X600 – before a post eventually saying it’s been retired, of course – is a full review. Happily LaptopMag are on hand to deliver just that, putting the 15.6-inch CULV ultraportable through its paces to see if it’s more than just good looks or falls flat like its smaller X340 sibling.
Dell have updated their XPS Studio 16 notebook with ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD4670 GPU, complete with 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. The new option – which is already listed on the company’s US site – replaces the previous HD3670 with 512MB of memory, and can be paired with up to a Core 2 Duo T9600 processor running at 2.8GHz.
Those of you interested in the Dell Precision M6400 notebook series, will be pleased to hear that AMD will soon be outfitting them with their ATI FirePro M7740 GPUs, which will offer a serious graphics boost.
AMD have announced the latest in its high-end professional 3D video cards, the ATI FirePro V8750 3D workstation accelerator, promising four times the processing power over rival systems. The FirePro V8750 boasts 2GB of memory with range-topping 115.2GB/sec bandwidth, together with 800 shader processing units, full 30-bit display pipeline and stream computing compatibility.
Video demo after the cut
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Acer subsidiary Packard Bell are set to release a CULV ultraportable for the European market. The Packard Bell Butterfly S FC has a 13-inch display and uses Intel's 1.4GHz Core 2 Solo SU3500 processor, with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard-drive.
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